Standard Music Notation (SMN) is a method of writing what is commonly known as “Sheet Music” or “Musical Scores,” to graphically represent a piece of music in a form that is familiar to and understood by musicians. SMN is a system that has developed and evolved over the course of several hundred years, and is almost universally accepted as the standard method for representing music graphically.
Standard music notation involves the positioning of note characters on one or more staves or staffs. Each staff consists of five lines and four spaces, each of which represents a particular musical tone. The sequential lines and spaces represent sequential tones, and the note characters differ according to the duration of the note. While there are relatively few note characters, so it is not particularly difficult to learn the length (i.e. number of beats or fraction thereof) of each note, there are many different tones, 12 in each octave, extending over many octaves. Moreover, as between the two standard staffs—the treble staff and the bass staff—corresponding tone occupy different positions on the staffs. It is accordingly considerably more difficult for most people to learn to mentally translate the position of each note character to the position that will generate the indicated tone on a musical instrument (e.g. the correct key on a piano, the correct string and fret on a guitar, etc.). This is especially problematic during a fast musical passage, where the mind has little time to process the position of the note character and translate it to the corresponding tone on the instrument.
Thus, for most people the only difficult aspect of learning to read SMN is being able to determine in an instant what tone is being represented by a note on the staff. There have been many attempts over the years to modify or replace SMN because of the general level of difficulty that most people seem to have learning this system. Most of the new methods proposed require a total change in how the music is annotated, and therefore such methods have never been successfully implemented because musicians who have taken the time to learn SMN to the point of proficiency will resist switching to an entirely or substantially new system.
Some proposed methods require less adaptation, using color as an additional indicator of tone. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,284,961 issued Sep. 4, 2001 to Richard C. Kimmel, Jr., which is incorporated herein by reference, teaches the use of a color for each of the 12 tones in an octave, while others published U.S. patent application Ser. No. 2002/0050206 published May 2, 2002 by Jane S. MacCutcheon, which is incorporated herein by reference, teaches the use of seven colors to represent the seven natural notes (A, B, C, D, E, F, and G) in an octave and a combination of colors to represent notes affected by accidentals (sharps and flats, which respectively raise and lower the affected natural note by one semi-tone).
These systems utilize too many colors and combinations of colors for most people to recall in the short time span available between notes in a musical composition. It is believed that most number of units in a set that is easily recallable for a majority of people is seven. However, some proposed seven color systems also increase complexity in an attempt to aid in the memorization of the note color combination. For example, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 2002/0050206 uses unintuitive color names (amethyst for purple, carrot for orange, diamond for gray, electric for yellow, flame for red) so that the first letter in the name of the color corresponds to the note that the color represents. This further limits the system to the English language; if it were desirable to translate this system for use in another language, say French or German (or even more cumbersome, Greek, Hebrew or Russian), new color names would have to be used in each language, thus precluding universality of the system.
Moreover, all of these systems add multiple changes to SMN that clutter the staff, and/or introduce unorthodox changes that deviate too substantially from the conventional music notation system and thus will not be accepted by mainstream users of written music.